When I decided I wanted to write, they didn’t have books that featured African-American people, but that didn’t stop me from writing my first book. My first book the girl was black and the hero was white. Back then at sixteen I was in love with Bo Brady from Days Of Our Lives, so since I couldn’t have him in real life, I made my heroine fall in love with him.
Writing my story, I didn’t consider that there weren’t any African-American romances in the market, I just dared to dream that one day my book could be the break through book to start it off. Of course that didn’t happen, but other books did break down the door and we began to see more books that featured characters that looked like me.
Fast forward to a few years and I’m proud to say we’ve come a long way. We have books in all genres that feature AA characters.
As a writer it has always been hard to break into the business, however with a lot of courage and determination, many have. Now we’re hearing the market is changing, the publishers are doing major layoffs and it will be even harder to get published.
What are our options now? Basically the same as when there weren’t any AA books. We write, we hope and we dare to dream. We honestly don’t have any say over on what happens with the market. All we have power over is our story. Continue to write and continue to dream because once you stop doing both, you fall into the trap that the publishing business is dying. If they don’t have writers it will die.
Get out those notepads, open up that laptop and write.
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